Posted Thursday, February 12, 2009 ; 09:36 AM | View Comments | Post Comment
Updated Thursday, February 12, 2009 ; 03:44 PM
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Story by Gretchen Mae Stone
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ROCK CREEK -- Just a few months ago, three little coal company houses stood along the Coal River, gutted and near the end of their lives.
Now, those three little homes are considered the Appalachian base for Climate Ground Zero and Coal River Wind. Their new tenant, 54-year-old national environmentalist Mike Roselle, is setting up shop to get ready for a long summer of disobedience in the coalfields.
But he's used to that.
Roselle started his life on the road as a yippie/lowbagger at 16, leaving Louisville, Ky., to first protest against the Vietnam War and then any supposed-environmental wrongs he felt needed righted.
Lowbaggers are part of a loosely tied alternative community that shares resources when living and traveling together.
Yippie is a term created by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both of whom Roselle said he met in those early Vietnam protests. The Youth International Party (YIP!) merged hippie counterculture and New Left activities, according to UrbanDictionary.com.
Later, Roselle was the founder of Earth First!, an environmental movement that has made headlines across the nation in the 1980s, '90s and this decade for its nontraditional and sometimes aggressive attempts to protect wilderness.
Some areas where Earth First! members have been active recently, according to the group's Web site, include a tree-sit protesting development on Vancouver Island, British Columbia; protests of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; and trying to stop seal slaughter in Canada.
Now, Roselle has turned his attention to Appalachia, with the goal of ending mountaintop mining.
A few months ago, Roselle quietly moved to the Ford Addition, a cluster of homes across a small bridge just down the road from Marfork Coal Co. near Rock Creek in Raleigh County. The arrival of such a famous environmental activist went unnoticed by most media and townspeople.
That changed Feb. 3, when Roselle and 12 others chained themselves to a Massey Energy Corp. bulldozer at a mine site on Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County. He was detained and cited, but not arrested, in his first direct action in West Virginia.
His newest group, Climate Ground Zero, is small. Only he and a few nuclear members moved to town. But that's how it's always been for his grassroots efforts.
His disobedience may be nonviolent, but it's unlawful all the same. Roselle has been arrested about 40 times for civil disobedience actions, such as trespassing and chaining himself to equipment.
Roselle said he and other Climate Group Zero members plan to help end mountaintop removal mining with such actions. More importantly, they want to end it through the courts. He has long taken the legal route to protect natural resources he sees as public lands, even if privately owned.
"If you have the law on your side, you should use the law. If you can't get the law on your side, you need to change the law," he said.
When he founded Earth First!, Roselle described it as "a painfully small group." One of the group's first actions featured him and his roommate headed from California to Oregon in 1982, where logging had started in a wilderness area.
He said Earth First!'s first meeting had about 40 people in attendance and then 20 at the second. At their first action, about eight people came and four were arrested. In 12 separate actions from April to July of that year, about 85 people were arrested. At that time, he said, none of the more traditional conservation groups would go in with Earth First! members on the 14-mile hike up a couple thousand feet of vertical elevation to the protest site. For some Earth First! activists, it was their first time in the state. It was the first time direct action and civil disobedience had been used in an organized long-term campaign, Roselle said.
"So that campaign resulted in probably a couple 100,000 acres of old-growth (forest) being protected, and from then Earth First! grew into a national organization," he said.
In larger campaigns, he has had up to 10,000 activists in attendance, with celebrities such as Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley there to help, Roselle said.
Since his beginnings in the environmental movement, Roselle has been part of Earth First!, the Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society and Climate Ground Zero, among others. He at one time sat on 12 environmental groups' boards, but he now focuses on consulting and, for the time being, ending mountaintop removal.
In his years of direct-action experience, Roselle said, he has always practiced nonviolence methods to forward the environmental movement.
But some Web sites insist Roselle was spiking trees as a member of Earth First! in its early days. Some media reports said Roselle has made statements urging others to do the same.
A copy of Earth First! journal purported to contain the quote was not immediately available as of press time.
That quote, reads in part, "This is jihad, pal. Everything, every assumption, every institution needs to be challenged. Now! And more spiking is needed to convey the urgency of the situation!... Go out and get them suckers, fill them full of steel, and I promise you this: you might get caught; you might do some time; your friends might abandon you. But you will never have to spike the same tree twice."
Roselle insists, however, that he has never spiked a tree.
He said the movement to spike trees was a small one, and that, like a union movement, it was sometimes violent when irate people took such action.
"It was never done in any organized way, and in most cases the people who did it were anonymous," he said.
Tree-spiking instances were rare, he said, and generally became overblown.
"It occurred, and I do know people who have been involved in it; that movement is not that big," he said. "The only reason I knew they were involved in it was after they were arrested, and I'd read about it in the papers."
The Ruckus Society Web site lists Roselle as one of two "infamous nonviolence practitioners," who founded the group. That group is dedicated to training activists in nonviolent forms of civil disobedience, Roselle said.
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